Clicker training and multiple bunnies

[Kate Monster]

Has anyone on here tried to do clicker training with more than one bunny?  I’ve read “Clicking with your Rabbit” which they sell here at binky bunny and it seems pretty straight forward. I’ve decided to give it a try to see if I can get them (especially Kate) to detest being handled a bit less.  It’s hard to brush or trim the nails of a bunny who runs away whenever you touch or pet her!  And they are very food motivated and phase 1 of associating the click with yummy treats has been pretty easy.  But now I need to figure out how to teach them to do other things.  I really don’t want to seperate them for training sessions because a) I think it might just stress them out so much that any teaching attempts would be a waste of time and b) I live in an apartment, I’m not sure I could take one anywhere where the other wouldn’t hear the clicking and get confused about the ‘click=food’ connection.  So, is it possible to try and teach them the same things at the same time?  Has anyone done it and what did you do differently than if you were doing this for one bunny?

[Beka27]

You really do have to separate them in order to train. The “click” is designed to indicate instant reward, it’s not possible to instantly reward two bunnies at once. One would always have to wait and that can be detrimental to the training experience. Most clicker training sessions will not last longer than about 5 minutes. They cannot have too many treats at once and they tend to have a short attention span. So you could do two training sessions back to back with each of them.

[Kate Monster]

The problem is, no matter where I take one in the apartment, the click would still be very clearly audible (small space and wood floors lead to lots of sound travel) to the other one and it seems like that would destroy the “hear a click, get a treat” basis of the method. And they really, really don’t like to be seperated. Any time I have put just one in the bathroom or tried to let just one out so I can do things like nail trim they both spaz out and I don’t really think that they could pay attention to me when they’re that stressed out. I don’t plan to get really elaborate with tricks, I just want them to come and allow more handling for the sake of grooming and nail trimming. If I click with my toe and treat with both hands, is there anyway I can conceivably do this?

[Beka27]

Could someone help you then? I really don’t know, I always separated mine for training sessions. Who knows, maybe it’ll still give good results.

[Sarita]

I kind of think try them together – they say that rabbits can teach each other so maybe the one who doesn’t catch on first can “teach” the other one…

[Elrohwen]

I have this problem. Sometimes they naturally go into different rooms and I try to catch them alone, but it’s tricky since there aren’t any doors and if they get bored with me they can be together again. Separating them and taking one to another part of the house would just stress them out and they don’t seem to learn anything when they’re stressed.

I think the only reason I can do both at once is that Otto already knows what the clicker is and can do a couple tricks. He knows when I’m asking him to do something and when Hannah is there I just treat him instead of clicking, so she doesn’t get confused by hearing the sound. When I work with Hannah I use the clicker, but I try to keep Otto busy on the side doing another trick. It’s confusing and neither of them focus very long (somebody gets jealous of the food and trys to hump the other, usually). I don’t think it would work at all if Otto didn’t already have a good grasp of things and I’m probably still confusing him a little. He sort of understands “good” as a substitute for the clicker, so I say that when Hannah’s around. He’s actually picked up a new trick recently with only one solitary session and a couple joint ones – it seems most detrimental to Hannah who still can’t do a trick without being led and has a horrible attention span (her attention span is worse when Otto isn’t around though).

One technique is to use two different sounds – one for each animal. I’ve seen clickers online that make up to four different sounds. Still, to begin the training I imagine you would need to separate them until they understand the concept or it would just be a lot of noise. Otto seemed to think the clicker was just noise for at least a couple weeks anyway and was really only responding to the food.

There’s really no good answer! I would just focus on one bunny for now and hope the other doesn’t get in the way too much. Once one has caught on, try doing both. Or you can just try training with treats and not use the clicker – clicking can help communication a lot, but if it just gets in the way of communication you might be better off without it.

[Kokaneeandkahlua]

You have to seperate them.
You want them to associate click=treat. They can’t do that if one of them is getting the click-treat pairing, and one is not. So you must do your training in another room

[Kate Monster]

@Kokaneeandkahlua, that was the reason for my question, I don’t have another room to do training in and even if I did they’d just get so geeked and stressed that it would be a wasted effort. I understand that it’s the ideal way, but I was just hoping that maybe someone had improvised and adapted the method a little bit.

Thanks for the advice all. So far it’s going pretty well working with both of them at the same time, I just put the clicker under my foot and a treat in each hand, they’re always together anyway so getting them to do things like come to me at the same time has proven to actually be pretty easy, and they seem to be learning at about the same pace so I haven’t had too much of a problem with one producing the desired behavior and the other not, I think Kate ‘gets it’ a little bit more and Spencer just follows her, but that’s ok, he’s more food motivated than she is so he’s still very enthusiastic about it. I’ll have to improvise a little when we get to things like getting them to let me touch their feet and maybe this little balancing act will fall through when we get there, but we shall see. At least they will still know to come to me when I need them to so it won’t have been a completely wasted effort. Maybe I’ll write my own book “Teaching with your Toes: utilizing all of your limbs to teach multiple bunnies” :-p

[Elrohwen]

Hahaha, I like the toe method!

I got the clicker from the BB store specifically so I could use both of my hands. I can hold it in my palm and click with my middle finger, while holding treats (or a target) with my index and thumb. I like it so much better than my traditional clicker.

[Author]

Messages